The Animal Factory – Daisuke Wakabayashi

This is how pigs are raised in China. Farmland is scarce, food production has lagged behind and ensuring the national need for pork is a strategic imperative.

Inside the building, which is as tall as London’s Big Ben and similar to the monolithic apartment blocks that characterize Chinese residential areas, uniformed technicians monitor the animals with high-definition video cameras from a NASA-style control room. Each floor operates as an autonomous farm that houses pigs in different stages of life: an area for pregnant sows, one for litters, and then areas reserved for suckling and fattening. A conveyor belt fills the giant tanks on the top floor of the skyscraper with feed. From here, five hundred tons a day are distributed to the lower floors thanks to a high-tech manger system, which automatically dispenses the meal to the animals, rationing it based on the age, weight and health conditions of the specimens.

The building is located in Ezhou, a city on the southern bank of the Yangtze River, and is considered the largest pig farm in the world. A second plant is scheduled to open shortly, and when both plants are fully operational they will produce 1.2 million head of cattle a year.

The love story that binds the Chinese to pigs is long. For centuries, families in rural areas have bred them in the backyard, considering them precious not only as a source of protein but also of manure to fertilize the fields. The pig also possessed a cultural value: it was seen as a symbol of well-being, because historically pork was only served on special occasions.

Today, no country eats more pork than China, which consumes half of the world‘s output. The price is carefully monitored: it represents an important indicator of inflation and over time, the government has created strategic reserves of pork to control it when production is low.

In China, however, the cost of pork is higher than in the rest of the developed economies, where breeding has already become industrial for some time. In recent years, Beijing has sought to bridge this gap, and dozens of giant farms have popped up across the country.

The Ezhou megafarm was built by Hubei Zhongxin Kaiwei Modern Animal Husbandry, a cement company that has also ventured into breeding, and which stands as a monument to China’s will to modernize pork production. “We are decades behind technically,” says Zhuge Wenda, the company’s president: “And that gives us room for improvement.”

The farm was built near the cement factory, in a region known as “the land of fish and rice”, due to the importance of its fertile lands and waterways for Chinese cuisine. Even if it’s called pig farm, the production line is more like that of the iPhone in a Foxconn plant, where everything is precisely calculated. Even manure is weighed, collected and recycled. About a quarter of the feed will turn into dry excreta from which methane can be made to produce electricity.

Sixty years after the great famine of 1959-1961, which killed tens of millions of people, China has still not optimized food production. It is the leading importer of agricultural products: more than half of the world‘s cultivated soybeans end up here, mainly destined for breeding. It manages 10 percent of the planet’s arable land but is home to 20 percent of the world‘s population. Chinese agriculture has higher production costs and the land yields less corn, wheat and soybeans per square meter than in other large economies.

These shortages have exacerbated in recent years as trade disputes with the United States, pandemic-related supply disruptions and the war in Ukraine have highlighted threats to China’s food security. In a speech delivered in December, Chinese President Xi Jinping called agricultural autonomy a national priority: “A country must strengthen its agriculture before becoming a great power, and only developed agriculture can make the country strong.” In the past Xi had warned that “China’s sovereignty depends on its ability to fill the bowl”.

And for the Chinese there is no more important protein food than pork. In 2019 Beijing decided that all ministries should support the pork industry, providing funding to develop bigger farms. In the same year, the government approved vertical farming in order to increase productivity per area. “It was a game-changer, not just for China, because I believe vertical farms will have an impact in the rest of the world as well,” says Yu Ping, executive director of Yu’s Design Institute, a company that designs pig farms.

As China modernized and hundreds of millions of people moved from the countryside to urban centers, small family farms disappeared. According to an industry study, the number of farms of fewer than 500 pigs a year dropped by 75 percent between 2007 and 2020, to around 21 million.

The transition to industrial-scale production accelerated in 2018 when African swine fever devastated Chinese farms, reducing the pig population by 40 percent.

Brett Stuart, founder of Global AgriTrends, a market research firm, said high-rise buildings and other types of factory farming increase the industry’s biggest risk factor: disease. Packing so many animals together makes it more difficult to prevent infections. In the United States there is the opposite trend, that is to expand the spaces so as to reduce the density per square metre: “US farmers look at the photos of these mega-farms in China, they scratch their heads and say: ‘We don’t we would never dare to do that,’” says Stuart. “It’s too risky.”

But when the price of pork tripled in one year and Beijing favored the large-scale model, the benefits far outweighed the risks. Skyscraper farms have multiplied, and the market, previously constrained by insufficient supply, has been overwhelmed by the availability of animals, driving meat prices down by 60 percent from the peaks of 2019. The sector in China is characterized by a volatility comparable to that of bitcoin, with cyclical peaks and falls that generate huge profits and losses depending on the crazy price swing.

Last month, Jiaxi Zhengbang Technology, a pork giant that has grown rapidly in recent years, said it had received its first warning: it may be forced out of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange due to the risk of insolvency. “The government hopes that market consolidation over time will make prices less volatile,” says Pan Chenjun, executive director of the food and agriculture division of RaboResearch, based in the Netherlands. “That’s the goal.”

In the countryside, once dotted with family farms, towers now grow. Three years ago, when the real estate and infrastructure sectors began to decline, Hubei Zhongxin Kaiwei decided to combine land availability with construction expertise to expand into a market with better growth prospects. He invested six hundred million dollars in high-rise farms and another nine hundred in a dedicated meat processing plant. Knowledge of material properties has proved useful. The multi-storey structure in reinforced concrete has allowed the company to reduce soil consumption, while the excess heat, accumulated by the concrete, is used to guarantee hot baths and tepid drinking water for the animals. According to the executives, this accelerates their growth, so the pigs gain weight on less feed.

It is difficult for small farmers to keep up. Qiao Yuping, 66, and her husband produce 20 to 30 pigs a year in northeastern China’s Liaoning province. In 2022, when the price of meat plummeted, they earned nothing. They explain that it is difficult to ignore the effects of mega-farms: because of them the cost of feed and vaccines has soared. “Everything has become more expensive,” she says. “How can we not be affected?”. ◆ gc